February 16, 2009 - Agfa HealthCare said today it completed the deployment of its IMPAX HeartStation ECG Management System at the National Heart Centre in Singapore.

The company's HeartStation ECG Management System is a comprehensive data management solution that automates the processing and storage of electrocardiograms (ECGs). The National Heart Centre (NHC) is the national referral centre for cardiovascular disease treatment in Singapore. With a 186-bed capacity, it manages more than 9,000 inpatient admissions and completes over 80,000 outpatient consultations, 75,000 cardiac investigative procedures and 1,700 surgical operations annually. The National Heart Centre is the only institution in Singapore that conducts heart and lung transplant programs.

Agfa said its IMPAX HeartStation ECG Management System is a vendor-neutral platform supporting most legacy and new ECG manufacturers. This neutrality when combined with a standard-based architecture allows the IMPAX HeartStation to easily integrate into the existing hospital IT infrastructure and ECG workflows. The system provides a single, unified point of access to historical and current ECG exams from multiple modalities supporting rapid review, serial comparison, editing, and electronic signing of ECGs throughout the hospital enterprise.

The National Heart Center served as a validation site for testing HeartStation version 1.1; the application has now been officially transitioned to clinical use. The National Heart Centre plans to extend the IMPAX HeartStation to hospitals throughout the country, effectively creating a nationwide ECG management system and repository. The National Heart Center also uses IMPAX Cardiovascular Suite, which provides an enterprise-wide, feature-rich cardiology image and information management solution that connects with imaging equipment and enterprise information systems, providing a comprehensive view of patient data from a single point of access.